The Ugandan Global Project: A Guest Post by Miriam Gorbatov

This post was written by Miriam Gorbatov, follow her blogging on Miriam's Magical Moments.

In all my years of blogging, I have had many different memories, but this memory was beyond great.  In third grade, my teacher, Mrs. Yollis, got the class involved in blogging.  This was an amazing opportunity to learn about the lives of other children around the world.  The highlight of the year for me was the Uganda Project.  We corresponded with a class in Australia, a class at Chaparral Elementary School, one in China, and one in Connecticut. We all wanted to keep this school in Uganda from losing a piece of land that they used as a playground. This class in Uganda, Africa, was grateful for anything they received.  The children had to walk three miles to school and three miles back just to get a good education. In contrast, the children in America often get driven to school even if the school is within a few minutes’ walking distance. They were also grateful to have any meals they could receive.  I felt heartbroken that we have anything we want, but they had nothing.  I also admired how hard they worked to receive an education.  Our school was determined to help save their playground.  Together, the five different classes organized a three mile walk around the neighborhood to raise money for the school.  

The five classes started the walk at the same time, at 10:00 am.  After walking for only ten minutes everyone was pretty exhausted.  But we all knew that we were going to finish the walk to help the school whether or not we were tired.  When we finally finished walking, we sang a song that we learned from one of the other classes. The song was about saying hello in all different languages. Though everyone was exhausted from the walk, we were still really enthusiastic about helping the class in Uganda.  I had learned a very important lesson that day that one should be grateful for anything one has or has an opportunity to do because these children are struggling even to get meals or a piece of land to play on with no playground.  

Over the next week, we continued to collect donations to help the school in Uganda. Mrs. Yollis taught us about the different types of currency from all of the countries. The teachers then counted up all the donations from all of the other classes that did the walk.  All the schools involved collected a total of $19,592. The teachers sent the money to Uganda, and we got a response saying that they had enough money to purchase the land for the ABC Divine Foundation Primary School, ensuring the children now have somewhere to play. We have also provided enough money for the school to start building a sheltered kitchen and dining hall. Everyone was very cheerful because all our hard work had paid off on our project, and it had been a great success.

This experience has inspired me to continue blogging about my experiences and travels. I hope to one day become an elementary school teacher and share what I have learned with my students.

[For Reference, below is the URL to our walk. http://ugandanglobalproject.blogspot.com/2010/10/california-walks-for-uganda.html]